Ramzi bin al-Shibh

Ramzi bin al-Shibh (1 May 1972-) was one of the founders of the Hamburg cell of al-Qaeda in Hamburg, Germany during the 1990s. al-Shibh was responsible for recruiting 19 9/11 hijackers in this position, but the expiration of his visa prevented him from taking part in the terrorist attacks. He was captured by the Pakistani ISI in Karachi in 2002, and Bin al-Shibh was detained at Guantanamo Bay for over ten years.

Early life
Ramzi bin al-Shibh was born on 1 May 1972 in Ghayl Bawazir, South Yemen to a working-class Sunni Muslim Arab family. He was taken care of by his mother and brother after his father died, and from 1987 to 1995 he worked as a clerk at the International Bank of Yemen. In 1995, he failed to obtain a United States visa (the USA did not want people from Yemen, a poor country, to overstay their visas and gain employment in America), so he headed to Germany instead.

Hamburg cell
In 1997, he met Mohamed Atta at a mosque in Hamburg, and he was roommates with Atta for two years. Bin al-Shibh and Atta founded the Hamburg cell, and the group would recruit 19 people to take part in the 11 September 2001 9/11 attacks. In 1999, Bin al-Shibh traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan to be trained by al-Qaeda, and he helped in the planning of 9/11. He was supposed to be one of the hijacker pilots, but he was refused a US entry visa four times due to the fears in America about illegal immigration. His friend Zakariya Essabar, another al-Qaeda member, was also denied entry. On 11 September 2002, he was captured by the Pakistani ISI and the American CIA in Karachi, and he was interrogated over the next decade; his trial began in 2012.